Crop until your drop
Find out how you can perfectly crop extraneous details and level out your photographs in Lightroom.
No photographer nails the shot perfectly every time. There are inevitably going to be times when our images are underexposed, or perhaps they’re overly bright. And the same can be true for our in-camera framing and composition – despite all the care and attention you put into it, sometimes it’s just a little bit off.
This is one of the many areas where shooting digitally has an advantage over traditional film, since you can crop an image after you’ve taken it.
You should be aware that cropping into your images removes the number of pixels in the shot – and thus reduces the size at which you can view and print your photos, because of the lower resolution. But if you want to fix a wonky horizon or remove clutter from the scene, Lightroom is a very efficient program to do it in.
We’ll look at aspect ratios, flipping crop orientation, and learning how to straighten up shots. We’ll also improve the composition so the prime focus is on your subject. So open up Lightroom CC, load a wonky photo, click on the Crop Tool icon in the top right, and let’s get started!
We’re using the cloud-based CC edition of Lightroom here, but the Classic edition has a similar set of crop tools.
1
ASPECT RATIO CROPS Lightroom’s Crop Tool has a built-in aspect ratio drop-down list, which conforms the length and width of the crop by a certain ratio. This makes it easier to get photos to a uniform aspect ratio. I’m choosing 8.5 x 11 here: Lightroom automatically aligns this to conform with the shape of the original photo.
2
ROTATE CROP ASPECT We want to cut out the gear around the edge of the frame so that only the backdrop is visible, so we actually need a vertical crop, not a horizontal one. Click the Rotate Crop Aspect button to flip the ratio from 11 x 8.5 to 8.5 x 11 (width by height).
3
STRAIGHTEN THE CROP Now we need to straighten up the crop. Head to the Straighten slider and give it a negative value (slide it to the left). Ensure that the grid overlay sits parallel with the top of the paper roll backdrop to have it perfectly vertically aligned. I used -5.28.
4
FINALISE THE CROP With your cursor, grab a corner of the bounding box and resize the crop until you’ve cropped out all the extraneous gear and you’ve filled the frame with nothing but the white background. Once done, double-click your mouse or press Return on your keyboard to confirm. TL